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Jess Nevins

1 Jan, 17 tweets, 5 min read

@doctorcomics

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It's #PublicDomainDay, and as requested by @doctorcomics I am providing a list of the best of the pulp heroes who are now in the public domain. * means the character or text they appear in are prime pulp.

Carlo Aldini: jessnevins.com/pulp/aldini.ht…

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* Bakterev: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpb/bak…
Black Eagle: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpb/bla…
Brigand: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpb/bri…
* Sir Ralf Clifford: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpc/cli…
Earani: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpe/ear…
Ebony: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpe/ebo…
Fifth Wanderer: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpf/fif…

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Fresquinho: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulpf/fre…
Jerzy Hartman: jessnevins.com/pulp/pulph/har…

Valentin Katayev's Stanley Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' nephew (son of Mycroft), who goes to India to stop a revolutionary movement from using a Russian scientist's super-magnet to create world peace.

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Aleksandr Beliayev's Professor Kern, who murders people to create Brains In A Jar so that he can discover the secrets of SCIENCE!

Frederick Irving Anderson's Sophie Lang, a flawless master thief: "Sophie, the uncaught."

4/

Tomas Lann from the film Luch Smerti (The Death Ray): Russian factory worker invents death ray, leads workers' revolution.

*Arthur O. Friel's Roderick McKay--very entertaining stories about a post-WW1 mercenary

* Jennette Lee's Millicent Newbury--crime-solving "mind nurse" 5/

* Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner--one of the greatest of the armchair detectives

* Bertram Atkey's Winnie O'Wynn, my favorite Con Woman of them all--she uses a splendid naif/ingenue act to gull everyone (think Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, only better written)

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* Reo Ratt--German cowboy hero in the 1920s who fights Mad Scientists, apes trained to hold up stagecoaches, and the Mysterious Four.

* Peyami Safa's Recai--greatest of the Turkish pulps' master thieves; he duels with Sherlock Holmes & Arsene Lupin in his adventures.

7/

Kurt Falkenstein's James Robertson--a Holmesian detective who fights against a Mad Scientist trying to recreate Frankenstein's experiments, Thuggee trying to retrieve a gold statue of Kali stolen by the British, Arsene Lupin, and Professor Moriarty himself.

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* Naum Rogozhin from the film Krest i Mauzer (Cross and Mauser". Rogozhin is one of the best villains in all of world film, period, full stop. A titanically evil Catholic "vicar," he literally files his nails to sharp points to accentuate his wickedness. Guilty of every sin.

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* Sanada Yukimura's Sarutobi Sasuke, a superhumanly powerful ninja (nickname "leaps like a monkey") who assists a samurai detective fight against the enemies of the Koga ninja and the enemies of the Emperor.

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Sharik, from Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog--scientist puts pituitary glands into a dog, transforms him into a lewd, foul-mouthed drunk who achieves great success in Soviet society.

* Fritz Lang's Rama Singh--a Sikh detective/adventurer active from Burma to Mecca.

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* AD Temple's Josh Stebbins--either an adventurer who teamed up with "Byron Murchensen," discovered suspended animation, and found & thawed out some frozen Vikings (with Eirik the Red becoming a bouncer in Chicago)...or a fabulous teller of tall tales.

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* Niels Meyn's Robert Sterling: a Holmesian detective who fights: Thuggee, living skeletons, murderous mummies, the Queen of the KKK, worshipers who want to bring the evil King Tut back to life, and gorilla executioners.

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* Marietta Shaginian's Mike Thingmaster--star of a three-volume epic about the worker's revolution to end them all. Thingmaster is a working class communist Doc Savage, only appearing in far better written stories than the later Doc Savage pulps.

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* Joe West, from German pulps--Thomas Edison-like inventor of SCIENCE! Appeared in 24 issues of ideasplosions. Story titles like "The Homunculus" and "The Secret of the Omega Rays."

JU Giesy's Dr. Xenophon Xerxes Zapt, one of the cleverest of the pulp Unlucky Inventors.

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That's the most notable of the pulp characters that are in the public domain as of today. (I'm using the word "pulp" in the broadest sense, ala Barthes' "metaphor without brakes"). There are more, but they're pretty run-of-the-mill characters.

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BTW, I would be delighted if someone started writing more Winnie O'Wynn stories.

Collection of stories here: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/1003722…

17/17

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Jess Nevins

@jessnevins

23 Dec 20

Okay, starting a thread now on family values on the American homefront during WW2. It goes some unhappy places, sorry, and got away from me a bit at the end, sorry again. But ugly truths are better than pretty lies, and pretty lies are what we're fed about the homefront.

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WW2: a time of great upheaval in the US. More than 15 million civilians moved to new counties over the course of the war. Wartime spending meant formerly poor people in suddenly available jobs were often flush with money. Psychological pressures due to the war were immense.

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So many civilians acted in ways that seemed entirely alien to how “real Americans” behaved. The result was a homefront whose strangeness seemed to match the strangeness that soldiers & sailors were experiencing at sea & in foreign countries. Everything became different.

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Jess Nevins

@jessnevins

18 Dec 20

Last week I mentioned my thesis on cyberpunk. Yesterday it arrived in the e-mail. Today I’m going to tweet some information from it.

This is about old-school cyberpunk (CP hereafter), CP as of 1995, so some of my points are out of date now. But others are still relevant.

1/

CP is frontier literature. Frontier lit was traditionally used to justify the creation/establishment of the US; later, to justify our economic growth, our emergence as a nation-state & our approach to modernization. It addressed issues of space, racial purity & gender roles.

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Hardboiled (HB) detective fiction made the city the frontier. HB addressed corruption, the downfall of the city, the US’ future, changing gender roles & gender performance. HB “generalized petty-bourgeois resentment against the collapse of the Southern California dream.”

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Jess Nevins

@jessnevins

28 Nov 20

Not to repeat yesterday's thread, but--I think I was wrong about something. The editorial comment about the Hollow Tree's diverse readerships--"Hindus, a Kongo African, etc" which I said yesterday was about Americans...I'm thinking the readers must have been international. 1/

Western Story Magazine didn't have international distribution per se, but it did have Australian, British, and UK editions, and those editions would have been distributed to the British colonies like any other British magazine was pre-WW2.
2/

And of course Hawai'i, mentioned in the Hollow Tree editorial as one of the nationalities represented, wasn't a state in the early/mid-1920s, it was a Territory, and Hawai'ians weren't considered "Americans."
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Read 9 tweets

Jess Nevins

@jessnevins

27 Nov 20

Anyone interested in a thread about where modern fandom came from, and who created it?

[only 18 tweets long this time! I may be learning brevity.

The accepted wisdom is that Hugo Gernsback invented sf fandom in the Science Fiction League & in the pages of AMAZING STORIES, and that (per Wikipedia) “a wide variety of Western modern organized fannish subcultures originated with science fiction fandom.” LIES! ALL LIES! 1/

The reality is that sf fandom was one point in a continuum, not the starting place. Modern fandom got its start in the late 19th century dime novels, but what we think of as fandom now, in the 21st century, is really the product of a few Western pulps and their women readers. 2/

Read 19 tweets

Jess Nevins

@jessnevins

26 Nov 20

So who wants to hear about the first queer woman sheriff of the pulps?

(Or has everyone bugged out of Twitter to start the gorging process?)

Thread Ho!

After 1924 the western pulps fractured & became gendered--western pulps for male readers, western pulps for female readers. There was significant overlap in readership between the two, of course, but the publishers thought that gendered pulps were the way to go. 1/

Eventually, in 1935, the trend toward western pulps for female readers produced ROMANCE (later ROMANTIC) RANGE. Laugh at it if you like, but RR was in the top 3 of the best-selling pulps, and had heavyweights writing for it and a devoted readership of men *and* women.
2/

Read 18 tweets

Jess Nevins

@jessnevins

24 Nov 20

in my nightmares I've written something like Ready Player Two.

RPT is...it's like a transcript of my worst self holding forth. It's Kurtz's vision of the horror, the horror. It's cosmic horror. It's Krapp's last tape, if Krapp were written (ironically, of course) by Evan Dorkin as a less aware member of the Eltingville Club. It's leprosy.

I charge Ernest Cline with sedition against the Muses.

Read 6 tweets

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